Margaret Mead Filmmaker Award 2015 - Margaret Mead Film Festival

The Margaret Mead Filmmaker Award recognizes documentary filmmakers who embody the spirit, energy, and innovation demonstrated by anthropologist Margaret Mead in her research, fieldwork, films, and writings. The award is given to a filmmaker whose feature documentary displays artistic excellence and originality of storytelling technique while offering a new perspective on a culture or community remote from the majority of our audiences’ experience.

For the first time in the festivals history the award was shared between two filmmakers; Kim Beamish for 'The Tentmakers of Cairo' and Liris Harma for 'Leaving Africa: A story of friendship and empowerment:

Prix Buyens-Chagoll 2015 - Visions du Réel

awarded to a film of humanist dimensions focusing on stories developing values that confer meaning to the future of mankind.

Kim Beamish blended in with a group of men as if he were one of them, freely recording their daily lives as craftsmen making carpets. Lives that are forcefully woven into the political situation in Egypt today and the current state of crisis. The filmmaker also reveals the beauty of the carpets created by these virtuoso craftsmen. Another aspect that touched us was the desire to transmit millennial expertise, which is accepted humbly and naturally by younger generations.